While I’d thought that Bernie Sanders would be blamed for Billary Clinton’s loss to Der Fuhrer Donald Trump for having had the audacity to challenge her for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, instead Bernie apparently is indeed the face of the Democratic Party that is emerging from the still-smoldering ashes. His new book, Our Revolution, comes out next week and already is on amazon.com’s list of top-100 best-selling titles as I type this sentence.

If I were to make a bumper sticker, that’s what it would say: Don’t blame me — I voted for Bernie!*

No, I’m not retroactively changing my stance in the wake of Billary Clinton’s stunning loss to a fascist demagogue who, for the first time in my lifetime, became U.S. president without previously having held some other elected office to help prepare him for the job.

… But if we just don’t mention how weak Billary is, then everything will be OK! Magically, her weakness only exists if someone who is left of center dares to utter something about it! Loose lips sink ships!

And when Billary loses to Donald Trump in November, we won’t blame her, but we’ll blame Bernie Sanders.That’s The Way of the Democratic Party Hack/Billarybot. …

and:

… If we progressives don’t take the Democratic Party back with Bernie Sanders, we’ll take it back with someone else — with Elizabeth Warren and/or with whomever else emerges in a leadership position or positions.

We are patient. …

and:

… Finally, it strikes me that we — all of us, Democrat and Repugnican (and everything else) — don’t deserve a President Sanders but fully deserve a President Trump. …

I still believe that, by the way: That Bernie Sanders is too good for the United States of America. He’s too smart, too honest, too moral. And Americans amply have demonstrated their depravity by allowing Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton and her “Democratic” henchweasels to steal the Democratic Party presidential nomination and by allowing President Pussygrabber to sit in the Oval Office come January.

That said, I did follow the presidential-election polling closely — I especially followed fivethirtyeight.com, which for weeks and weeks had put Der Fuhrer Trump’s White House win at a significant improbability — and so yes, I had come to expect Billary most likely to win, and so for a little while I was in a bit of a state of shock and awe (awe of the bad kind).

But it didn’t last long. Life goes on, shit must still get done, and the political pendulum always swings back your way, in time.

In retrospect Billary’s loss was quite foreseeable — I wrote about it here months ago — and it’s good that the Democratic Party establishment has been smashed to pieces. Because from those pieces, those ashes, needs to rise a new, actually progressive party.

Happily, I apparently was wrong about my prediction that Bernie Sanders would be blamed for Billary’s loss by the Billarybots. Tellingly, it’s been largely radio silence from Billary and the Billarybots, and the early signs are that third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein might be blamed by the Democratic Party hacks for Billary’s loss, much how Ralph Nader was blamed by the Dem Party hacks for Al Gore’s lackluster presidential campaign in 2000.

I’d thought that Bernie would be blamed for Billary’s loss, but the No. 1 thing that thus far I’ve seen blamed, way too conveniently, for Billary’s loss is white racism/white supremacism.

While that was a significant factor in Billary’s loss, no doubt, that wasn’t at all all that there was to it, and the Democratic Party never will recover if its adherents refuse to look beyond that.

Billary was an incredibly weak candidate. Fuck, Bernie Sanders, a relative unknown and not even a Democrat (that’s a good thing!) but an independent, a democratic socialist,won 46 percent of the pledged (democratically earned) delegates in the Democratic Party presidential primary fight — that’s how unpopular Billary has been within her own fucking party.

Billary has a mountain of baggage and no one fucking likes her. The electorate did not want a blast from the past, a return to the Clinton era of the 1990s. The electorate did not want another Clinton or another Bush in the White House (which is why the Billarybots within and without the Democratic National Committee had to do their best to sink Bernie and to boost Billary; the product that they were pushing down our throats is fatally flawed, and so they had to cheat mightily).

And over the past few decades, first under Bill Clinton and then continued under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party stopped being a truly populist party. It stopped caring about the working class and the remnants of the middle class, to whom it only paid lip service at election time. It abandoned labor unions (except for asking labor union members for campaign cash and and to be campaign workers) and it welcomed the limousine liberal — the rich person who wants to avoid angry mobs coming after him or her and his or her money with torches and pitchforks by having gone on record with the right stances on certain sociopolitical issues.

Yes, over the past many years the Democratic Party became much more about identity politics than about socioeconomic politics, and that’s a huge reason why we’re about to have President Pussygrabber in the White House.

Another huge reason for that potentially devastating development is the Democrats’ refusal to face up to the party’s weaknesses. The Democratic lemming-bots have refused to acknowledge not only Billary’s massive shortcomings, but they have refused to acknowledge that President Obama over these past eight years hasn’t delivered his ubiquitously promised “hope” and “change” but for the most part has given us only more of the same, that he hasn’t been anything remotely resembling a strong, progressive leader, but has been only a caretaker in chief (at best).

That’s another huge reason that Billary lost: Americans looked at the past eight years and recognized, correctly, that another four (or eight) years under Billary Clinton would be just like a third (or third and fourth) Obama term: a continuation of the anesthetizing, centrist slog that the past eight years have been.

Obama in 2008 didn’t campaign on just trying to keep one’s head above water — because that’s not exactly inspirational — but that’s exactly what it has been like for most Americans under his presidency.

Yes, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, jingoism, etc. — the entire Big Basket of Deplorableness — must continue to be addressed and must be continued to be opposed by the Democratic Party and those of us who are left of center, but that can’t continue to be the party’s whole fucking show, or the show is fucking over.

Indeed, methinks that the toxic identity politics that has gripped the Democratic Party in large part is what helped to sink Bernie, who was widely view by the toxic identity politicians as just another old white man (and thus unacceptable as the party’s presidential candidate), even though he’s infinitely more progressive and much more liked than Billary Clinton ever has been or ever will be — indeed, even though he very probably would have beat Trump on Tuesday.

It was supposed to be enough that Billary is a woman, you see.

Obviously, it wasn’t enough, and if the Democratic Party doesn’t learn its lessons — the central lesson of which is to ease off of the toxic identity politics and get back to the bread-and-butter issues that it has abandoned — it could be a long, long time before it’s back in power again, if it ever comes to power again.

This is important to remember if one thinks that white-bashing and/or man-bashing is going to win one a national election.

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*I am quite proud of the fact that I never have cast a vote for the corrupt, center-right, Democratic-in-name-only/Repugnican-Lite Billary Clinton, not once, and that I never have given her even one fucking penny.

Not only did I vote for Bernie Sanders in the California Democratic Party presidential primary in June, but I gave his campaign more than $1,000 over time. I still consider it to have been a good investment in the future — not just mine, but everyone’s and future generations’.